1 - Third complaint lodged against family court Judge Denise Pratt.
With just days before early voting begins in the GOP primary, Webster family lawyer Greg Enos has filed a third criminal complaint against embattled family court Judge Denise Pratt with the Harris County District Attorney's office.
The complaint, which details one of the 631 cases Pratt dismissed on Dec. 30 and Dec. 31, accuses the freshman Republican judge — who is seeking a second term this year — of backdating an order in open court. It includes sworn affidavits from a couple who say Pratt informed them that she was "backdating this order" and screenshots indicating Pratt signed the order at an April 25 hearing, but dated it March 5.
Enos' second criminal complaint, filed last month, alleges that Pratt broke the law by purging hundreds of cases last month without giving prior notice to lawyers or their clients. His first complaint against the district court judge, filed in October, accuses her of backdating orders in two unrelated cases. That complaint led to the resignation of Pratt's lead clerk and sparked an investigation by the DA's office and a grand jury, which ultimately no-billed her.
Pratt, through her lawyer, blamed the backdating on her court clerks. Enos says it's "totally different" this time.
3 - Why is Harris County just now getting a CPS court?
On Monday, we published a story about a new, but temporary specialty court opening in Harris County in the coming weeks that will hear only Child Protective Services cases, likely those involving children who have been living in foster care for more than a year.
As Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner John Specia noted in Monday’s story, it takes longer for foster children to find permanent homes in Harris County than any other county in Texas.
At the end of 2012, 40 percent of the more than 4,800 foster children in the CPS system in the county had been there for at least two years, compared to 25 percent statewide.
There is a wide body of evidence indicating that specialty CPS courts help foster children find permanent homes more quickly. Many other Texas counties have created them. But this one — funded only through 2015 — is Harris County’s first. Why?
Interviews with judges and other local officials indicate there exists a variety of conflicting opinions about how, and whether, the structure of the court system in here needs to change — either to address the backlog of CPS cases or the larger backlog problem in the family district courts.
State Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, said she initially approached local judges last year about permanently converting a civil district court into a CPS court, but the idea met with fierce resistance.
“I basically told them they needed to address this issue, that we needed to start doing something and I was quite adamant about it, and they just pushed back about creating this court,” said Huffman, a former district judge. “They didn’t like the idea of Austin, the state, telling them at a local level … how they were going to run their courts.”
3 - New CPS court aims to help kids in system the longest
Kristopher Sharp spent nearly half his life in foster care, shuffled from home to home - 28 in all - before aging out of the system in Harris County at 18. In eight years in Child Protective Services, he recalls seeing a judge only twice: once on the way in, and once on the way out.
Sharp's experience helps define much of what ails CPS in Harris County, where 40 percent of the more than 4,800 foster children in the system in 2012 had been there for at least two years, compared to 25 percent statewide.
Sharp and others who have languished in the system have helped provide the impetus for change in Harris County with the creation, at least temporarily, of a court dedicated to Child Protective Services cases. Advocates say the special court will help reduce a serious backlog of CPS cases and find permanent homes for children much more quickly, in part because the judge will have more time to spend on each case.
"There was a time, I say often, where everybody believed that it was OK that when you put a kid in foster care, it was OK if we just kept them safe, warm and dry," said John Specia, head of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and a former San Antonio family court judge. "But now, the focus out of the federal government and out of all the various advocacy organizations is well-being and permanency. The difference between children doing well in foster care and not doing well is that permanent attachment, that permanent forever family."
